A Climate Disaster is Already Underway, United Nations Report Warns

A new report from the United Nations agency on cli­mate change is pro­vok­ing reac­tions through­out the world.

According to the dozens of inter­na­tional sci­en­tists and experts at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is now proven that the warm­ing of the atmos­phere, ocean and land is hap­pen­ing, and human activ­i­ties cause them.

The report is a first step toward the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which is due next year and is steer­ing the polit­i­cal debate in many coun­tries. It demon­strates how Earth’s cli­mate has already been changed irre­versibly, such as the rise of sea level and the thin­ning of the ice sheets.

“The evi­dence is irrefutable: green­house gas emis­sions are chok­ing our planet and plac­ing bil­lions of peo­ple in dan­ger,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted. ​“Global heat­ing is affect­ing every region on Earth, with many of the changes becom­ing irre­versible. We must act deci­sively now to avert a cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe.”

Guterres added that this report serves as ​“a code red for human­ity.”

According to the IPCC, human-induced cli­mate change already affects many weather and cli­mate extremes in every region across the globe.

“Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heat­waves, heavy pre­cip­i­ta­tion, droughts and trop­i­cal cyclones and, in par­tic­u­lar, their attri­bu­tion to human influ­ence has strength­ened since the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5),” the report said.

While imme­di­ate coor­di­nated action could pre­vent the aver­age tem­per­a­ture from exceed­ing 1.5 ºC above pre-indus­trial data, tem­per­a­tures are already 1.1 ºC warmer, which is a level unseen since the most recent ice age 125,000 years ago, the report said.

Should noth­ing be done, tem­per­a­tures could con­tinue to rise in the fol­low­ing decades, between 2 ºC and 4 ºC, impair­ing human activ­i­ties and even the sus­tain­abil­ity of life in vast areas of the planet.

Dozens of coun­tries could even dis­ap­pear, accord­ing to Mohamed Nasheed, a for­mer Maldive pres­i­dent and coor­di­na­tor of the group of the so-called ​“at-risk coun­tries.”

Satyendra Prasad, Fiji’s ambas­sador and per­ma­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tive to United Nations, defined the report as very alarm­ing.

“It comes out exceed­ing where we all thought the esti­mates were,” Satyendra Prasad, Fiji’s ambas­sador and per­ma­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tive to United Nations, told the Guardian. ​“It brings for­ward some of the cat­a­strophic sce­nar­ios that we have been think­ing about in the Pacific of sea-level rise, loss of low-lying lands and pos­si­ble loss of entire coun­tries within the cen­tury. The time­lines for these things will cer­tainly be brought much closer.”

According to the researchers, even a coor­di­nated global effort to cut emis­sions will prob­a­bly not be enough to stop the world from sur­pass­ing the 1.5 ºC thresh­old. Still, it could bring tem­per­a­tures down before the end of the cen­tury.

“We must treat cli­mate change as an imme­di­ate threat, just as we must treat the con­nected crises of nature and bio­di­ver­sity loss, and pol­lu­tion and waste, as imme­di­ate threats,” said Inger Andersen, IPCC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor.

According to the IPCC, cli­mate change is hap­pen­ing at a level and pace that the world has not seen for thou­sands of years.

The IPCC authors also under­lined how cli­mate warm­ing events, such as the abrupt change in ocean dynam­ics and cir­cu­la­tion, can not be ruled out even in the best sce­nario.

However, they also spec­i­fied that the most chal­leng­ing vari­able to tackle is how humans respond to cli­mate change threats when it comes to uncer­tain­ties in the cli­mate mod­el­ing pro­jec­tions.

“We can’t wait to tackle the cli­mate cri­sis,” United States President Joe Biden said in response to the report. ​“The signs are unmis­tak­able. The sci­ence is unde­ni­able. And the cost of inac­tion keeps mount­ing.”

Facing the cur­rent cri­sis gen­er­ated by some of the largest and dan­ger­ous wild­fires ever and by the severe drought, California Governor Gavin Newsom added that ​“noth­ing about today’s IPCC report should come as a sur­prise. Even for those that ignored decades of dire warn­ings from cli­mate sci­en­tists, there is no deny­ing what’s right in front of us: a cli­mate cri­sis.”

According to sci­en­tists, many changes in the cli­mate sys­tem have become more sig­nif­i­cant in direct rela­tion to increas­ing global warm­ing.

“They include increases in the fre­quency and inten­sity of hot extremes, marine heat­waves and heavy pre­cip­i­ta­tion, agri­cul­tural and eco­log­i­cal droughts in some regions and pro­por­tion of intense trop­i­cal cyclones, as well as reduc­tions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and per­mafrost,” the researchers wrote.

As glac­i­ers in the world retreat at an unseen pace, sea ice cov­er­age in the Arctic in the last 10 years dur­ing sum­mer­time has been lower than in the pre­vi­ous 1,000 years. Over the past 2,000 years, Earth’s sur­face tem­per­a­ture has not grown as quickly as it has since 1970.

The report fur­ther said that the record hot tem­per­a­tures recorded from 2011 to 2020 make the decade hottest of the past 6,500 years.

The Mediterranean Basin, the cra­dle of the olive tree and home to about 95 per­cent of the world’s olive oil pro­duc­tion, is among the areas des­tined to expe­ri­ence more sig­nif­i­cant impacts from cli­mate change.

“The basin cli­mate is unique, and it is chang­ing at a faster pace than else­where,” Gianmaria Sannino, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist head­ing the sea level and cli­mate change lab at the European Climate Research Alliance, told Olive Oil Times. ​“In the Mediterranean, the aver­age tem­per­a­ture has grown more than else­where, in the range of 1.2 ºC or 1.3 ºC.”

“In the last 50 years, the tem­per­a­ture has increased on aver­age by 1 ºC in south­ern Spain,” Ignacio Lorite, a researcher at the Andalusian Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research (IFAPA), told Olive Oil Times.

According to Lorite and other experts, olive grow­ers do not cur­rently have a sin­gle cli­mate-related issue that will most promi­nently trou­ble them.

“The effect of cli­mate change on rain­fall is not yet obvi­ous,” he said. ​“Although drought peri­ods have been iden­ti­fied dur­ing the last years, these events have been recur­rent in south­ern Spain for a long time.”

Still, Mediterranean Basin olives and agri­cul­ture could pay a high price to the heat­ing cli­mate.

“Heatwaves in the area are going to hit more and more, and they are poised to last longer if no action should be taken to cur­tail the ris­ing tem­per­a­tures,” Sannino said.

In their 3,000-page report, the IPCC authors explained that car­bon diox­ide emis­sions were higher in 2019 than in the last two mil­lion years. In addi­tion, green­house gas emis­sions such as methane and nitro­gen diox­ide were also much higher than those in the pre­vi­ous 800,000 years.

Among the report’s find­ings is the pace of sea-level rise, which has been accel­er­at­ing in the past 3,000 years.

“This report tells us that recent changes in the cli­mate are wide­spread, rapid and inten­si­fy­ing, unprece­dented in thou­sands of years,” Ko Barrett, the IPCC vice-chair and senior cli­mate advi­sor for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Los Angeles Times. ​“The changes we expe­ri­ence will increase with fur­ther warm­ing.”

Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has ben­e­fited from a grow­ing set of tools to mea­sure and ana­lyze both past and present cli­mate and map and model future change.

The sci­en­tists said in the report that they are work­ing with the IPCC to mea­sure ​“tem­per­a­ture, clouds, winds, ice, snow, ocean cur­rents, sea level, soot and dust in the air and many other aspects of the cli­mate sys­tem.”

Satellite sys­tems have increased the depth of the analy­sis while his­tor­i­cal data, records and obser­va­tions are now inte­grated with the new mea­sure­ment tech­niques.

“Ice cores, sed­i­ments, fos­sils and other new evi­dence from the dis­tant past have taught us much about how Earth’s cli­mate has changed through­out its his­tory,” the IPCC report said. ​“While most cli­mate mod­els in 1990 focused on the atmos­phere, using highly sim­pli­fied rep­re­sen­ta­tions of oceans and land sur­faces, today’s Earth sys­tem sim­u­la­tions include detailed mod­els of oceans, ice, snow, veg­e­ta­tion and many other vari­ables.”

Guterres fur­ther empha­sized how the newly pub­lished report, ​“Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis,” is to be con­sid­ered a tool to under­stand the dynam­ics of cli­mate change and its con­se­quences bet­ter. He hopes that the report will allow gov­ern­ments through­out the world to inform their poli­cies.

“I count on gov­ern­ment lead­ers and all stake­hold­ers to ensure COP26 is a suc­cess,” he said, allud­ing to the upcom­ing COP26 sum­mit, which will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, start­ing October 31.

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• United Nations